For some reason, I have been reading the slew of atheist books that have recently appeared: Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens. There was a reference in the Hitchens (God is not Great) to this documentary, which won an Oscar for best documentary in 1973. It is the study of a young Pentecostal preacher named Marjoe Gortner, where Marjoe is a contraction of Mary and Joseph. Raised by revivalist preachers, Marjoe began preaching at age 4, and continued into his teens. He became disaffected, and moved into the California counter-culture. He then returned to preaching in his twenties, this time cynically milking the crowds, and dreaming of a career as rock star or movie actor.
The documentary combines archival footage of Marjoe as a young child preaching, interviews with Marjoe in the present (1970-71), and extensive footage of the adult Marjoe preaching at a series of tent revivals. As documentaries go, this one is not particularly good because it never really decides what to do with Marjoe himself. Is it using him to uncover the sleazy, cynical, money-making side of the evangelical preaching circuit, or it is deconstructing his own motivations, ambitions and ambivalences? Nonetheless, it is worth seeing just for the scenes of the adult Marjoe preaching, and the reactions of the faithful who come out to see him. As in ‘Jesus Camp’ I found the intensity of emotion – sweat glistening, speaking in tongues, collapsing and writhing on the floor – disconcerting, but it is undeniably powerful. The hook for the documentary, at least as far as the adult Marjoe is concerned, is the techniques that preachers use to extract money from their flock, but, 35 years on, in an era of TV evangelists and the moral majority, they look pretty tame and not perhaps as exploitative as the film-makers seem to think.
Marjoe makes it clear in the interviews that he wants to break out of preaching, and he does at times look like Mick Jagger, twisting and straining his body as he invokes sweet Jesus before the crowds. I looked him up on IMDb and he had an undistinguished screen career, mostly doing TV work. Interestingly, he played a preacher in a number of his screen appearances. He never did escape the role he was practicably born into.